Linguistics is not a field I keep up on regularly, but the preceding item raises some interesting questions. For instance, what language has the second largest vocabulary? What language, historically speaking, had the greatest number of linguistic influences?
If you read the whole Economist article you might have noted that this isn't a precise count, and that the inability to perform a precise count underscores the fluidity of human language. Odds are, however that in the months up to and just after April of this year the Hindi, Mandarin, and Spanish tributaries (as well as a host of others) will have engorged the English language past the arbitrary point we call One Million Words.
If I remember correctly, the average speaker of English uses a cluster of about 10,000 different words, mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, in about 90 percent of his or her communication. Total vocabulary: 40,000 words. College education, with a specialty area? 100,000.
It seems to me that English will not only fragment into only partial intelligible dialects, but that these dialects will reflect more than geography. They will, eventually, reflect "communities of choice". A new category is being born.
Will the old progression of dialect to creole to separate language altogether fall to the wayside?
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